2. shopping for vegetables…especially in a fruit and veg shop where the produce is piled together in families. I get soooo excited by the lush green celery lying sedately beside the sour pink of the rhubarb (another beautiful word right there). I run my eyes over the sunshine yellow of the little flower-shaped patty pan squashes and can’t help rubbing the bulbous purple-black of the aubergines. The lemons sit smiling alongside their orange cousins and the perky little limes, the apples—a rainbow display—scent the air already tinged with mango sweetness. Is it any wonder I’m a vegetarian?

3. sitting outside (and under cover) during a rainstorm…listening to Nina Simone…in the dark.

4. pouring chocolate cake mixture into the baking pan! Need I say more…the texture, the smell, the colour, the viscosity….

5. shaping a batch of warm bread dough into a smooth, white mushroom of yeasty possibility! It’s grown up play dough…that you can eat!

6. opening a new book…and then, much later on, checking the size of the wedge of pages I still have to read until the end. It’s especially exciting when I love the book and the wedge is still huge…it means there are still hours to spend in an alternate universe. I enjoy the pleasure even more when the book is one in a series that I have enjoyed or it’s one that I’ve read before. I re-read the following books frequently: Redeeming Love (Francine Rivers), The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrey Niffeneger), Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte), Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen), the Twilight books (Stephenie Meyer), The Book Thief (Marcus Zusak) and the Monster Blood Tattoo series (DM Cornish)…and the Bible.

7. the perfect cup of tea at the perfect temperature—hot enough to burn your throat, but not hot enough to burn your tongue—preferably from a teacup…what style of teacup is too complicated to explain, but I know one when I see one. And the tea tastes best when it has been poured from a tea pot, and is followed by a second cup. When I die they will find that, where some people are made up of 70 % water, I am 65% tea!

8. the smell of jasmine warming in the sunshine. The only thing better is lying on the grass (or a green blanket…it must be green) smelling the flower’s sun-distilled perfume.

9. swimming in the dark. I love that moment of slipping into the water and the soft lapping splip of cold water embracing warm skin and the echoing slap of the same ripple as it hits the wall of the swimming pool at the end of its short journey.

10. long-pronged forks and knives with long, rounded blades (like the old fashioned boned butter knives), not to mention soup spoons with deep, rounded bowls and real old-fashioned tablespoons. I trawl through op shops for them and fight the temptation to buy more than I have room for (but come on, at 20 cents each, I can afford a few…dozen…extras)